Paintball solves a plumbing problem

[Hooptie]

A couple houses up the street had their main line valve replaced by the city. And a lot debris found its way through my main line, slowly building up in my plumbing. I ran into a trouble spot in the shower, and if you've ever worked on a stand-up shower, there is no snake or wire that can get make the right angle bend at the shower head top nor at the bottom through the Delta manifold. By blowing the pipe, I knew the debris obstruction was in this area (marked up blue area), and had to find a way to get it out.

I discovered that DYE barrel backs can slip over the shower head pipe. And with the velocity adjustment cranked to the max, I was able to rapid fire all the debris obstruction back out through the Delta manifold. I'm sure a compressor would have been fine, but a paintball marker can send burst of air, like an impact driver, and is definitely a lot lighter.



My next project will be the creation of a barrel adapter that when attached to a paintball marker, can be used as substitute for a plunger. Inspiration credited to RedNeck plunger, available at respected stores everywhere.

Thank you for reading this post. I felt quite accomplished and definitely justified that Paintball is the perfect hobby for me.

[Trbo323]

Now that is done outside the box thinking

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[coyote]

I tip my hat to your redneck engineering sir!

[Cdn_Cuda]

You mean something like this?

[SignOfZeta]

While it worked for your use case, %99.999 of all home plunging, maybe more, happens on drains and not supply lines. The biggest burst of air a paintball gun can make is going to have zilch influence on a 3” line crammed with bog roll and Papa John’s. You’d need at least a T shirt cannon, and I can only imagine what it’s like to clean the ceiling after someone tries something like that.

“Drain bladders” are the boring day to day tool that does this job.

[Magageddon]

I work as a water operator and the last place I worked had a jelly bean blaster. It was a device that hooked up to the water lines inside a home and you could pressurize it and shoot jelly beans to break up blockages in the pipes, the hard candy was tough enough to break up the iron mag, but would eventually dissolve in the water.

[Trbo323]

Ok, the real question here is what mode did you use? PSP? Millennium? NXL?

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[SignOfZeta]

I work as a water operator and the last place I worked had a jelly bean blaster. It was a device that hooked up to the water lines inside a home and you could pressurize it and shoot jelly beans to break up blockages in the pipes, the hard candy was tough enough to break up the iron mag, but would eventually dissolve in the water.

Ok. The guys will hate me for spilling the beans (ha!) but that was a prank. We just wanted to see if you’d eat the beans and boy did you!

But seriously. What is this apparatus you’re describing? I’m having a hard time understanding how it would work and Google isn’t helping. If the pipe is blocked how do you have the flow necessary to move jellybeans at speed/volume?

[Magageddon]

My old job had it, I cant remember the manufacturer, but you would hook it up to a water meter flange inside a persons home and pressurize the pipe and you could load and shoot hard candies/jelly beans at high speed and it would break up corrosion/blockages in peoples service lines coming into the home.